For some reason when I re-posted the article here it missed this paragraph:

Original sin is the idea that God created an absolutely perfect good world and a single sin against God committed by one person marred the purity of creation and implicated all of humanity in the act. The Christian gospel teaches that the pre-existing penalty for act of separation from God was eternal death. Being that humanity could not save itself from this penalty, Jesus Christ, a member of the Holy Trinity, personally came to earth, lived a pure life, died, and was resurrected, reconciling fallen humanity to God, thus closing the sin-caused gap between humans and God. Human beings who accept this death as substitution for their own prospective penalty will be given eternal life in a new earth.

Almost 11 years ago, Pope John Paul II, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, caused quite a stir by declaring that "new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis." Some Catholics, particularly traditionalists, believed that the Holy Father was stepping outside of his competence in making judgments on scientific matters. Others, including Catholic scientists, welcomed Pope John Paul's reaffirmation of the traditional Catholic principle that "Truth cannot contradict truth." In other words, to the extent that the theory of evolution has a solid scientific basis, it must be compatible with Catholic doctrine.

A decade before, the secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, delivered a series of homilies that were published in 1990 under the title In the Beginning . . . : A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall. In those homilies, he made a similar argument: The creation story in Genesis is a spiritual history. It simply doesn't matter what physical means God used to create the world and all living creatures therein; what matters is that man is both body and soul, and his creation is not complete until God has breathed the breath of life into him. And about the creation of the soul (and, thus, of the complete man), science can tell us nothing.